Using AMF as a file format

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, ActionScript 3, Applications, CSSAug 26th, 2009 | 6 Comments Flash is a great platform. You can build applications for the browser, the desktop, and… well, what else is there? When building applications, especially those with a document-based model such as the Aviary apps, Odosketch, My Canvas, ZenStudio, the apps on acrobat.com, and many others, you need a file format for the document or project. Or some way to save it. What Not To Do You don’t want to save each item into a table in the database. I know a guy…who had a dream…that his friend did this. This guy’s friend in his dream had a table for each item that needed to be...

Response Pattern in ActionScript 3

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, FlashAug 24th, 2009 | 6 Comments Earlier I posted about the Response Pattern. Today I wanted to show an ActionScript implementation and how it would be used. The API I decided to go with for this pattern uses method chaining. This is one of those things where people love it or they despise it. I'm sorry if you are one of the latter. Method chaining is where an object returns a reference to itself as the result of its methods. This allows you to call many methods on the object in one line. jQuery uses this and it is used a lot in the Zend Framework. As example you might have a drawing API helper that does this: shape.fill(0x660000).rect(0,...

High quality, high performance thumbnails in Flash

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexJul 17th, 2009 | 24 Comments Ever need a thumbnail of an image in Flash? I do, and honestly speaking, the resampling that Flash does is less than ideal. Unless you only need to resize by half or bigger. But my thumbnails usually need to be smaller. I searched for a solution and found on voq.com a promising library with some algorithms that worked quite nicely and a demo. The quality was nice, but the speed was slow. It also fiddled with the color a little bit. If I put the "easyScaling" parameter down from .5 to .25 I ended up with a nicer thumbnail but was slower to make and had more color disfiguration. You could tell what...

ActionScript 3 Wildcard Setters

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3Mar 4th, 2009 | 3 Comments All credit goes to Tyler for this trick, but I'm sure I would have thought of it too. :) Tyler has been working on an XML specification, what he things Adobe should have done in place of FXG which is a standard that was built around implementation with Flex. During this process he has also done tests from time to time to see how it might actually pan out using Flex builder, and we're pretty confident it could all be done there. One of the issues is this new standard should support shortcuts. An example in the XML is: <group>     <layout padding="10px 10px 10px 50%"/> </group> <group...

Flight Framework Highlights

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, Flex, PHPFeb 12th, 2009 | 4 Comments The Flight Framework is basically a collection of great utilities and independent tidbits that are organized to help us build our application. So I thought I'd make a call out to all the great standalone features in Flight, tell what they are, and leave it to another day to go more in depth on them. Fix for abstract classes The tiny static classes in the flight.error package allow you to ensure an abstract class is not instantiated and that abstract methods are overriden. Registry A global registry to store objects or data that anything in an application can have access too. Reflection The "Type"...

Undo/Redo for all your TextFields

Posted by Jacob Wright in ActionScript 3, Flash, FlexFeb 4th, 2009 | 49 Comments I made the TextField undo component. Add this component to any Flash or Flex application and all your text components will have undo and redo. This has been open sourced and is on http://code.google.com/p/undo-textfields/. Instead of making different Flex and Flash components to use in place of the available components, I made one that adds undo to existing text components. It should work in Flash and in Flex, though I just have a Flex example to show you today. You can see that it can be container specific, though you would probably just put it on the root of your application or the stage. Type...